Saturday, October 3, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
TRADE: Activists Ready Protest ‘Artillery’ for WTO Cancun Meet
Diego Cevallos
- Delegates from groups opposed to the prevailing globalisation model are already gathering in the Mexican resort city of Cancún, preparing forums and mobilisations to protest the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference to take place there Sep. 10-14.
More than 30,000 people from around the world are expected to arrive in Cancún to express their rejection of the way globalisation is unfolding, and to "take aim and push the WTO meeting into failure," Héctor de la Cueva, spokesman for the Mexican Network of Action Against Free Trade (REMALC), told IPS.
Earlier this week REMALC delegates headed to the ministerial conference site on the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula to make room and board arrangements for the visiting activists. The Mexican network has been working for the past year to coordinate the actions of the anti-globalisation groups in the run-up to the WTO meet.
The REMALC representatives are also looking for a venue to hold the People’s Forum, a meeting slated as a counterweight to the trade ministers’ conference.
"We hope that the peaceful demonstrations will not be responded to with the violence that governments usually utilise, but if that happens we will be prepared," said De la Cueva.
The WTO ministerial conference, the fifth such meeting, will take place in a luxurious convention centre of 19,000 square metres. Delegates from the organisation’s 146 member states will be in attendance.
In addition to the official contingents will be some 2,000 journalists as well as hundreds of invited delegates from international institutions and non-governmental organisations.
Governments want the Cancún meet to produce advances in key areas of multilateral trade liberalisation. But the preparatory negotiations do not provide much optimism for success. The talks are bogged down in issues of farm trade and poor countries’ access to low-cost essential medicines, among others.
The government of Mexico, the first Latin American country to host a WTO ministerial conference (the top decision-making body of the multilateral trade system), announced that it will guarantee the safety of all attendees as well as a climate of openness and tolerance.
The Vicente Fox administration has warned that it will not permit violent protests and that any outbreak of that nature will be dealt with.
For the past two months in Cancún – a major tourist destination on the Mexican Caribbean coast with its luxury hotels, shopping centres and beaches – hundreds of soldiers and police have been keeping watch over the official preparations for the September conference.
"The objective of our groups in Cancún is to derail the ministerial conference and to lift our voices against unjust globalisation and the power of the WTO," said Alberto Gómez, leader of the National Union of Automonous Peasant Organisations of Mexico.
Gómez told IPS that some 400 agrarian organisations from numerous countries and with links to the international group Vía Campesina will form a major presence in Cancún during the WTO meeting.
He said the tentative plan is to block land access to Cancún by setting up camps and erecting roadblocks on the major routes.
Alvaro López, member of Mexico’s National Farm Workers Union, says Cancún will be encircled, "and we do not rule out the possibility of bloodshed" as a result.
The event will draw thousands of people who do not mix well with the predominant model of trade and liberalisation championed by the "rich countries and the transnationals," according to López.
The groups that try to block the WTO conference will have to deal with "highly efficient" military operatives, said a lieutenant in the elite force that is entrusted with protecting President Fox and of overseeing police and military security operations for international meetings held in this country.
"Nothing has been left to chance. It will be very difficult for protestors to spoil the Cancún meeting," said the lieutenant, who spoke to IPS on condition of anonymity.
Many representatives of the anti-globalisation groups plan to attend the People’s Forum and marches, but also to take part in the WTO meet itself, where a special session is scheduled for them to voice their opinions to the member states’ trade officials.
"It’s true that some of us will be both inside and outside the conference, but we will always be guided by the intention that the ministers’ negotiations must fail, in order to open the way for new concepts, for a more humane and just globalisation process," said REMALC’s De la Cueva.
The international movement against neoliberal economic globalisation has gathered force in the past few years, with its groups of all different stripes showing up at all major world forums on trade, development and finance.
The movement’s first and most spectacular achievement took place in the northwestern U.S. city of Seattle, in late 1999, when massive street mobilisations contributed to the debacle of the WTO ministerial conference amidst clashes with the police.
Reformists, anarchists and other leftist activists, as well as human rights, student, peasant, environmentalist, labour and women’s groups are all represented within the movement.
Many have participated in the World Social Forum, an international space for such activists, with the first three annual meetings held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, as a response to the World Economic Forum held simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland.
At the most recent World Social Forum, in February, one of the resolutions was to designate the WTO meeting in Cancún as the "next Seattle", and urged the Forum participants to converge on the Mexican resort city in protest.
"We are ready to create a forceful presence in Cancún and to derail the conference," said the REMALC spokesman.
But the Mexican government assures that everything will be in order, and that order will be maintained, when the trade ministers gather there in September.
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